German Joys

Quote for the Day: Greatness and Compartmentalization

"Most great men owe their salvation to the fact that their strength exists in a watertight compartment to which their weaknesses have no access."

From Ernest Newman's 1934 biograpy of Franz Liszt

Quote of the Day: Karl Kraus on Vienna Gossip

"If I cross the street with a woman, I am an adulterer; if I cross it with a man, I am a homosexual; if I cross it by myself am addicted to masturbation." -- Karl Kraus

Quote for the Day: Maitland on History

"All history is but a seamless web; and he who endeavors to tell but a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears the fabric."

 - F.W. Maitland

Quote of the Day: Sacredness and Motivated Ignorance

'The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.'

Jonathan Haidt

Quote of the Day: Plummeting Sex Workers

“We are not going to have fire and brimstone and sex workers raining down from the sky.”

Via

Lichtenberg Aphorisms in English

From a website called Mangan's (Adventures in Reaction), I stumbled on a nice collection of Lichtenberg's aphorisms translated into English. A selection:

• "I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one's opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us."
• "Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever."
• "He traveled through Northeim to Einbeck and from there through Mlle P. to Hanover."
• "With my pen in hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed."
• "Proposal: in a cold winter why not burn books?"
• "Truth will find a publisher at any time, complaisance usually only for a year. That is why when you write you should always do so with courage and candor."
• "I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account."
• "It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard."
• "Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even afraid of them.""We have the often thoughtless respect accorded ancient laws, ancient usages, and ancient religion to thank for all the evil in the world."
• "The world offers us correction more often than consolation."
• "Since this life is no more than an evanescent point of time, I find it incomprehensible that the state of unending bliss and glory does not begin at once."
• "There are people with so little courage to assert anything that they dare not say there is a cold wind blowing, however much they may feel it, unless they have first heard that other people have said it."

Quote of the Day: Kierkegaard on Shooting Himself

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”

— Soren Kierkegaard (Journal Entry for March, 1836).

Via This isn't Happiness, of course.

Quote of the Day: AL Kennedy on Her Life

Scottish writer AL Kennedy on her life: ""I have sex about once every five years. I've lived alone since I was 17. I am slightly tired. My life is not comfortable to me. But I am philosophical."

From a recent essay on writerly procrastination:

I am aware that there are writers who successfully avoid ever having to write at all. Whatever creative energies they may possess have been completely absorbed by displacement activities. These activities often include dressing, sounding and standing (if not drinking – in fact, usually drinking) like an author and so these individuals can seem far more convincing as artists of the well-turned phrase than many people who actually have been published. When I was starting to write, I found this type very confusing. Indoors, I was bewildered by both writing and not writing. I didn't know how to say what I wanted to, or if I really wanted me to, or if anyone else wanted me to. Out in the world, here were these amazing excuses to never bother about such things again. They were a temptation. But I did realise that they were also a horrible, horrible dead end.

Quote of the Day: Edward Bellamy

"[The average American] conceived of a socialist, when he considerd him at all, as a mysterious type of desperado, reputed to infest the dark places of continental Europe and engaged with his fellows in a conspiracy as monstrous as it was futile, against civilization and all that it implied."

Edward Bellamy, Introduction the American edition of Socialism: The Fabian Essays (1894).

Quote of the Day: Zbigniew Herbert

“The poet’s sphere of action, if he has a serious attitude toward his work, is not the present, by which I mean the current state of socio-political and scientific knowledge, but reality, man’s stubborn dialogue with the concrete reality surrounding him, with this stool, with that person, with this time of day—the cultivation of the vanishing capacity for contemplation.”

Zbigniew Herbert, 1972 (via).